This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Wages For Housework with Emily Callici | 325

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Let’s talk about the most essential job that no one wants to call a job: the work done inside the home. Parenting. Caregiving. Running a household. It’s all real work — valuable, skilled, and foundational. And yet, it’s often dismissed, devalued, and definitely unpaid. This week, we’re going all in on the fight to change that narrative. Nicole is joined by historian and professor Emily Callaci, whose latest book Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor uncovers the radical movement that dared to ask: what if we paid people for domestic labor? What if the backbone of our economy — caregiving and home-making — was finally treated like the work it actually is? We unpack the historical, political, and economic forces that keep unpaid labor invisible, and what it means to truly value the labor that happens in homes across the world. This episode is fiery, informed, and long overdue. Because here’s the truth: without unpaid labor, nothing else works. Connect with Emily:  Book: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emily-callaci/wages-for-housework/9781541603523/?lens=seal-press Audio Book: https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0027t58 Related Podcast Episodes: Women’s Role in Defining Masculinity with Moe Carrick | 252 Fair Shake: Women And The Fight To Build A Just Economy with June Carbone | 246 Holding It Together: Women As America's Safety Net with Jessica Calarco | 215 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. I am Nicole Kalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. And today we're talking about something that frankly pisses me off. And it's this. The work that happens inside the home, the work of parenting, caregiving, running a household, being treated like it's not real work. Like it doesn't deserve the same recognition, respect, or compensation that working outside the home does.

Sure, it's meaningful and can be rewarding, but let's be honest, it's also extremely hard work. Your pint-sized or even elderly coworkers can be real assholes. The kind that throw food at you, scream in your face, and literally wipe their bodily fluids on your clothes. Nobody follows directions, nobody respects boundaries, and half the time you're not even sure who it is that's in charge.

And there's no paycheck, no PTO, no promotions or benefits, no handbook or clear job description. Just a constant feeling of being watched, judged and second guessed. Meanwhile, this invisible unpaid labor makes it possible for someone else to go out and do their job. And too often the person doing this work at home

is also holding down a paid job outside of the home. And yet somehow this labor inside the home gets taken for granted. No real value assigned, just the occasional I couldn't have done it without them speech. Like a pat on the head for keeping the whole damn operation running. And here's the thing, they're right. They abso-fucking-lut absolutely couldn't have done it without them. Because without all that unpaid labor, all those tasks would have to be done by that person or be outsourced.

We're talking a nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, a chauffeur, a tutor, an assistant. And suddenly, we're able to put an actual value on that work. But for some reason, we don't. We don't even try. And don't even get me started on the women who work inside the home that feel guilty about spending money or even worse, aren't even given access to the household income because they're quote unquote, not the ones earning it. Friend, I'm all up on my soapbox today.

So buckle up, buttercup, because I'm beyond energized on my soapbox today, so buckle up buttercup because I'm beyond energized to welcome today's guest, an expert who's been researching and writing about this very topic. Emily Kalachi is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches courses on African history, reproductive politics, and global feminism. Her latest book, Wages for Housework, the Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor dives deep into this movement and asks us to consider what if we valued caring for people and our environments

as much as we value producing and consuming commodities? I mean, that's a pretty big question, friend. So Emily, thank you for being our guest. Clearly, I have big feelings about this topic. And so, let me kick us off by asking what it is that you mean by wages for housework. What did I miss in my intro? What did I get wrong? What does wages for housework even mean? Mm-hmm. Sure.

And I just want to start by thanking you so much for that incredible introduction. I mean, the listeners can't, you know, see, but I'm like nodding vigorously, silent clapping, like it pisses me off too, which is why I wrote this book. But Wages for Housework, you know, it's a feminist movement from the 70s. It's actually a group of people, you know, that got together with this as their demand. And you know, I came interested in this topic because I was facing this in my own life.

As you mentioned, I'm a professor of history. I'm also a parent. I have two young ones. I became a parent, I guess, seven years ago now. And I was faced with that thing that so many of us are faced with, which is the double shift. You have a very, in this country,

paltry maternity leave, and then you're back at work, and you're working these 18 hour days. You wake up early in the morning to do all the care work, then you go do your full-time job, and then you come back and you do more care work. And I found myself wondering, I grew up in the 90s with feminism. I've always been about girl power,

and I've always really cared about things like equal pay for equal work and career opportunities for women. But I found that the feminism I kind of grew up with didn't talk about this part of the equation. I grew up thinking, oh, we've solved that. And so now I'm just working my ass off all the time. Like I'm kind of asking myself, what have feminists had to say about this issue?

So of course, I'm an historian, the thing I do is I go to the archives and say, let me look at what feminists have said about this. And that's when I came across this, you know, little movement from the seventies or that started in the seventies called Wages for Housework. And it was this group of really dynamic, you know, disruptive women who basically said, you know, it's really important to have equal rights. It's really important to have equal rights. It's really important to have abortion, equal pay. But there's a bigger issue or not bigger, another issue here that's not being addressed, which is all this work that is happening

that is necessary for the economy to work is not counted. And if you don't address that, you can't get at the bigger questions of inequality. So I wrote a book looking into this movement and it kind of is organized around these five women who I found really interesting about, who brought really different perspectives about housework to the table.

So I'm a little upset that I didn't know about this movement or that it's been as long, as far back as the seventies and yet we're still talking about this. And at least in the United States doesn't feel like we've made all that much progress, if any, and somehow sort of also feels like we're going backwards. So let's talk about, a little bit about the lives of these five women that you feature in the book.

Tell us a little bit about them and what we can gleam and learn and what's most relevant to us today. Mm-hmm? Sure. So as I mentioned, I organized around these five women. The first one, her name is Selma James, and she grew up in Brooklyn and she's born 1930. So she's now in her nineties. And she grew up like a radical leftist,

like she was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and it's largely working with this kind of movement that's largely about the working class and about men, you know, like, at a time when we thought of the working class as being people who go to a factory to work. But what she was doing as a kind of political person, an organizer, she was herself a single mother and a factory worker, she was going around to the homes where women who worked in the factories and at home, you know, were doing their housework or, you know, to housewives and interviewing them about their lives. And her insight was, you know, if you're talking about class politics and you're only talking about people who go to the workplace, to the factory,

you're missing a big part of it, which is all these workers that are at home, you know, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, making it possible for the rest of us to go to work. So she was really interested in this topic, you know, long before the 70s, you know, but when the 70s moment kind of hit, she was like, yes, feminism is what I've been talking about all along. And for me, this is really about women's work. So she started a branch in London, which is where she was living at the time. And then a second member of this movement is Mari Rosa Della Costa, who grew up in Italy. And she was part of the big student movement of the 60s. She protested the Vietnam War. She was in sit-ins at university buildings, trying to really, you know, part of that movement.

And she was also part of a kind of big labor movement in Italy at that time, which was launching all these wildcat strikes across the factories of northern Italy. And she was also part of a kind of big labor movement in Italy at that time, which was launching all these wildcat strikes across the factories of northern Italy. And she kind of similar to Selma James, although independent of her, had a similar recognition, which is you can't just talk about work as happening in the factory. You know, she's someone who's a college-age woman who is facing the fact that everyone expects her to graduate and go get married and have children. And she's like, no, that's not what I want. So she really kind of thought about how to expand our idea about work, to go beyond the factory to the home. So she and Salma James Met started this movement, a branch in Italy, a branch in London. And then they're joined by Silvia Federici,

who is, so she was a philosophy PhD student. She was Italian, but she was in New York kind of, you know, working on her doctoral work. And she got really interested in this movement as well. And, you know, part of the sort of, you know, zeitgeist of 1970s New York was, you know, of course, the feminist movement, but also like massive budget cuts. You know, there's a big austerity crisis. They're cutting public education, they're cutting subsidizedity crisis. They're cutting public education. They're cutting subsidized daycare. They're cutting all these social programs. And what Sylvia Federici and her kind of New York feminist sisters were arguing was that when you cut

those programs, you're not just kind of being fiscally responsible. You're freeloading basically. When you cut daycare, you're not getting rid of the need to care for children. You're just asking women to do it for free instead. So a fourth person that I write about in the book, and I apologize if I'm being a bit too long-winded here. I'll try to be a bit more clear. No, you're fine. OK.

Is Wilmette Brown. So Wilmette Brown, she's a Black lesbian woman who grew up in Newark, New Jersey. And she's a member of the Black Panther Party. She was an anti-war protester. And she kind of got disillusioned with the Panther Party because of their gender politics. And so she kind of discovered wages for housework.

And for her, it was a real turning point, because she said, yes, as a Black woman, this is so relevant to our experience as having historically, for generations, been doing unpaid and underpaid care work. You can go back to slavery, you can go back to colonialism, all these historical events of global importance that really were built on exploiting the unpaid work of Black women.

So she started a group called Black Women for Wages for Housework. And then the fifth person I write about is Margaret Prescott. So she was from Barbados, and she had this really interesting kind of life experience where she grew up in a place where, you know, so many of the women in her community migrated abroad to work as nannies and domestics, you know,

in London or New York. So she saw how all this work that women were doing really made the global North cities like New York and London function. And then she herself moved to Brooklyn as a teenager and she encountered this sort of idea that immigrants are freeloaders. For her, it was exactly the opposite.

All of their work was what was making the economy function. So when she joined Wages for Housework, she brought this whole kind of immigration perspective to it. And these women at the time in wages for housework, they were seen as really radical, as really kind of pushing the envelope, as because you can imagine this is a time when so many feminists were like, we don't want to talk about housework because we don't want to be associated with housework. We want to be free of that work. But they were saying, you know, like we need to actually recognize this, you know,

to compensate it, you know? And then what they're trying to do was to really kind of change the whole system of how our economy works. Okay, my brain is going in 1 million different directions all at the same time. So first, I love these different perspectives because it's not all the same.

And we're not just talking about the work from inside the home, you know, formerly called stay at home, parents. We're not just talking about... There's so many different elements of this, but ultimately what we're saying is, regardless of who's doing it, though the vast majority of the people who are doing it are women, regardless of who's doing it, though the vast majority of the people who are doing it are women. Regardless of who's doing it, there is value to this work. It is necessary.

Jessica Clarker wrote a book, it was like How Women Have Become America's Safety Net. Yes. And that kept popping into my head while you were talking where it's like, we're the ones who are allowing or these caregivers, these homemakers are the ones that are allowing all the other work to happen and allowing for us as a country to not have to provide these social programs or compensate or reward or recognize this labor that's being done and that has huge value. Am I capturing this even moderately well? Absolutely.

Can I give you a statistic? I just looked it up, but I'm not an economist, but the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tried to calculate the value of women's work, unpaid work, and it came to $3.6 trillion a year. That's a massive part of the economy. So yeah, I mean, when you talk about like, economic growth and the importance of that thing,

what does it mean if we don't actually count that as part of the economy? And what does it mean if we don't actually do any support for it? That means women are kind of giving this for free when they, yeah, anyway. Well, and another thing that popped in my head with all of these movements,

there always seems to be something that gets forgotten or missed or overlooked or left out. So, you know, you mentioned the Black Panther movement not being the policies or the forgotten element of the women. We think of the feminist movement, and there is a lot of, and I think very viable and real feelings that black women were left out. We think of women's work, this podcast is called This is Woman's Work, it meant to be tongue-in-cheek because of you know how

we used to define it. And so I kind of understand the inclination of wanting to separate woman's work from housework. And yet I have a firm belief that my definition of woman's work is whatever feels true and real and right for you. And for many women, not just women, but for many women, that choice is to work inside the home. So that is woman's work if you choose it.

More importantly, I think woman's work is that we all collectively support and demand that that work be valued. So how do we do that? Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And I might mention that one of the kind of inspirations for Wages for Housework was a more working class and Black women's movement in the US, which is the welfare rights

movement. These were women who were recipients of welfare, who in the 60s, they argued like welfare is not a handout, it's not charity, it's a wage. We're doing critically important work. I think there's a real opportunity there for feminists across lines of class, across lines of race to come together and say, actually, there may be all these things that divide us demographically or in terms of wealth, in terms of class, but we all share this core thing. We should stand up for each other in actually demanding a society that recognizes and compensates that.

I think it was a real missed opportunity. You mentioned some of the sort of ways that the feminist movement has excluded Black women or has had these different kinds of blinders on, right? And so I think that one of the things I find impressive and interesting about this moment of Wages for Housework was how they did try to go across those boundaries. They did try to think about what does the suburban housewife in the kind of heterosexual nuclear family share with someone who is living and dealing with the extra work that comes with environmental racism

and a neglectful landlord, right? They're not in the same situation, but the fact that they're doing this work that is totally denigrated by society and not compensated is something they share in common and can potentially support each other in organizing behind. So that was one of the things I thought was interesting about this. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay.

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Yeah, I think, you know, we think of the feminist movement or even just equity and want equality, and oftentimes we go to, like, more women in the C-suite. And great, I want that too. And to me, this is so much more important. If we could address the caregiving work that's being done by those who are working full-time and those who are outside of the home and those who aren't,

that to me would make the biggest difference and create the biggest opportunity for those who choose to work outside of the home or want to be in the C-suite or want to grow and elevate in their roles, because to me, it's not a merit issue whatsoever. The idea that women can't lead is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. But what I think more often gets in the way of our ambitions, our talents, our opportunities, is this pull back that so many of us feel,

this not being able to do both at a high level, feeling like something is going to break and feeling exhausted all the time. A lot of times because we have children and households to manage, but even caring for our aging parents. Or there's so many other ways that this is playing out that are a lot of our male counterparts just aren't feeling. They're not experiencing. I'll also add too, I read a study that the younger generation of women

who are in college and graduating now are very much not attracted to the way their gen X or older millennial parents have been doing it. This idea of doing both looks exhausting to them and they want nothing to do with it. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, that was a lot. What are your reactions or responses to anything that I said? Sure.

Yeah, no, I'm interested too. So I teach, you know, I teach undergraduates. So like, you know, I'm in my 40s, but my students are, you know, late teens, early 20s. And I've been interested to see their reaction to this stuff. So like, I've, you know, I teach a class on reproductive politics, and I've been I've assigned this essay called Wages Against Housework, you know, that was part of this stuff. So like I've, you know, I teach a class on reproductive politics and I've assigned this essay called Wages Against Housework, you know, that was part of this movement.

And when I first assigned it, you know, about 10 years ago when I first started teaching, students found it really interesting, kind of quirky, but they saw it really as an artifact of the past. You know, I think many of them are like, you know, I don't do housework, like I'm, you know, I'm 20, you know, but I'm surprised, I'm interested in the fact that when I signed it more recently, students are like, yeah, we get this. This seems really vital. And I think part of it has to do

with the pandemic. And that was a time when you couldn't hide all the work that goes on. I mean, you'd sit in Zoom meetings and people would have kids on their laps. We saw how critical, essential work was, essential work of childcare. And so I think that students, young people, have an awareness of how much their own lives and how much society relies on that. I think a lot of them, like you say,

are seeing what grind culture has done for us in terms of it's a double shift, essentially. It's endless work. And I think a lot of people are us in terms of, it's a double shift essentially, it's endless work. And I think a lot of people are questioning that, right? And wondering, is that what it means to live a good life? So I do see a lot more interest in that. And I find that really interesting, potentially really, really exciting,

if the students are at a point in their lives where they're thinking, maybe we should actually do things a little differently in our society. Yeah, okay, so that leads me to my next question, is how do we do things a little differently in our society? Assuming that we believe that whoever it is who is doing this currently unpaid work of caregiving, household management,

and when I say caregiving, yes, I mean children, but I also mean aging parents and all the different ways that if we think of social work, I think, predominantly done by women. So, even teaching, while it is paid work, it's dramatically underpaid work. So, how do we, how could we, and I'm gonna ask this separately though, I think both are

essential, value this work at a higher level and then how do we compensate this work? Yeah, that's kind of the big question, you know? And I mean, the question of how do we value it, you know, I mean, I think economists have all kind of tools for how they're trying to, you know, like trying to, for example, you know, that $3.6 trillion figure I gave you, I believe that was calculated by asking what would this work actually cost if people were doing it in the market, like as a mani or as a paid domestic or that kind of thing. But I think that when the movement kind of started in the 70s, there was this sense of

So when the movement kind of started in the 70s, there was this sense of like, wage for housework, like literally a wage being paid to people for housework. And I think there was a lot of debate about, do they really mean that? Like, do they really mean you should fill out a time card for like when you're like cleaning up the puke of your, like what, like,

and I think most people did not think that was the goal. Right? You know, like, I think it was a bigger question about recognizing that work in the economy. And some of the places where I see that idea kind of coming to fruition more recently, you know, I'll just name a couple. But one is, so a lot of the women who started this movement or were in this in the 70s are

actually still together doing this work today. So particularly Selma James and Margaret Prescott, they've now renamed the campaign to be, I think, a little more inclusive and capacious. But they call it care income rather than wages for housework. So they're fighting for what they call care income now that really recognizes the rights of parents to care for their children.

But also, as you mentioned, recognizing caring for the elderly, caring for people with disabilities. And also things like care that happens in the community. You can think about, for example, the ways in which, in places where you have crumbling social structures, often it's women who kind of step in to do that work. So the care income is really kind of about

taking a more capacious approach to care and seeking ways to kind of recognize and compensate that. Another place where I've seen this kind of idea come up is in proposals for the Green New Deal. There are different versions of that in Europe, in the US. Part of the idea is that so many of the industries that have been the most profitable, that we think that we traditionally thought of as being really important to our economy, are really terrible for the climate. And so I think part of the thinking

is how can we sort of in the longer term reorient our economy towards less of that and more towards the kind of economic work that is maintaining our society, caring for our society, protecting the environment, particularly thinking about people who live in environmentally fragile areas or people who live in agricultural areas. So thinking about that caring for the planet as being part of what we think of as housework, a kind of extension of housework. And then another place I've seen this come up

is in conversations about guaranteed income or basic income. I know there's lots of different versions of this, some I like more than others, but some of them have been, for example, aimed at, for example, new mothers, right? Who are caring for children, are just are up against it in terms of what's required of them.

And so giving them a kind of income to allow them to do that work and to take care of themselves and their families. That's a policy that I think has been really interesting and the results have been really, really positive. Then there's littler things like the child tax credit. That was, in my view, an incredible policy in this country. Even beyond the issue of women's work, it also, you know lifted children out of poverty, you know Like so we have these you know, this kind of suite of potential things we could do to actually compensate and uplift that work So I think a combination of those things, you know would really kind of help this issue Yeah, as you were talking

Different ideas were popping into my head and ultimately where my brain went to is this is a very complex issue. It's not as simple. I mean, the belief that this work should be valued and compensated in some way is strong for me. How we do it, that feels a little complicated. I go to individual or internal ways. I'm talking internally to your family. I think the reason my brain goes this way

is my background is in financial planning. I worked for a Fortune 100 financial planning firm and worked with a ton of financial advisors and even went on meetings with some of them. And the amount of times that I observed, and it was 100% of the time, a man talking about their stay at home, or work inside the home, spouse, and we were talking about life insurance. And they'd be like, oh, we don't need any on her.

And, like, I wanted to flip tables. I'm like, help me understand how you think you could still keep doing what you do for a living. Like, there's no financial implication if she weren't here to do all the shit that she's doing. Like, it was so confusing and frankly just off putting. And then I talked to some friends where they're, to girlfriends where their partner is the primary income earner and this sort of guilt around spending money or not having money. And I'm like, isn't there some sort of internal conversation

of some sort of stipend or dollar amount that you get from the household income because of your contribution to the household income? Because they couldn't go out and do the work. They couldn't go out and make the money without you. So there's that sort of internal component. Let me just pause, because I have thoughts on the other side,

but what other things should we be thinking about within our own families and units? Another idea too is like, when we think about elderly parents, oftentimes their siblings involved, but more often than not, one person takes the brunt of the work. How is that person being compensated

for lack of a better term? So what should we be thinking inside our own homes? Don't even get me started on the single parent. Like my brain is going all over the place. What should we be thinking about internally? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I mean, so I don't know. I want to talk about it.

I think that maybe the place I'm coming from is that part of Wages for a Housework as a feminist movement was that you can't solve this as an individual. It requires a collective change. I could individually find a way out of this. Maybe I have a partner that shares the work equally with me. Maybe I have a lot of money and I can pay people to do this work. Or maybe there's some kind of individual way out. But I think that the changes that are needed are really collective ones, you know, like, and there are all kinds of instances, you know, where people, for example, like find within their

communities where ways to like, kind of share and distribute that labor, you know. Yeah, but I think that's part of the problem is that, I mean, like, again, I think we can all find our own way to to piece with that or to, you know, or to quietly being raged about it. But I think that really the answer is kind of collective. Yeah. I think you're probably right because, you know, I think about it on an individual basis, and it's like you've got to have the relationship

with the other person or the other people involved in order to do that. It's so easy for me to say, like, well, if I wasn't being recognized or rewarded or compensated, I'd just fucking leave, because guess how much I'd have to pay then. You know, like... Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, that's not always a viable option. That's not always the right option, and that's just me being a jerk, right? Um... So, on the more collective community or external options, you mentioned several. What about parental leave or care leave or...

And we just feel like there are so many things we could be looking at. And again, parental leave, to me, that's just such a no-brainer. And other countries are doing this, and the fact that we can't figure it out is mind-blasting. But even this concept of care leave, valuing the caring of our aging community, because people are living longer and they earned and deserve our respect and yet the burden that that's become more frequently on women, again it's like my brain wants to go to what's the solution.

And the answer is very complex, right? Yeah. I mean, one of the things, I don't know if this is helpful at all thinking this through, but, you know, one of the things I, you know, found people kind of talking about time and again is like, you know, is housework like just shitty? Or is it like, is it really rewarding and actually really skilled?

Or is it both? I don't particularly feel sublimely rewarded when I'm scrubbing bananas off the floor. I really do find some aspects of it really rewarding and fulfilling and of course, very highly skilled. So it's how we think about that work. Like Wages for Housework, when it was first kind of proposed, it was really about supporting women in the home

and supporting women to have more autonomy, for financial autonomy, right? To not feel that they're the financial dependent of the male breadwinner, right? But one of the questions that came up was, well, what if men wanna do housework too? And the answer was, awesome. Like, and maybe if this work was not so devalued was, well, what if men want to do housework too? And the answer was, awesome.

And maybe if this work was not so devalued and had no economic value in our society, maybe more men would do it. Maybe that actually does. And it's been really interesting seeing the kind of ways that people have responded to my book. It's like, I expected women of that generation to be like, well, yeah, obviously this is really important.

I've been doing housework my whole life. Where's my paycheck? Where's my pension? Right. But I've been actually surprised by how many men like older men in particular have been like, wow, like I never thought about that. And now that I am thinking about it, oh my God, like I didn't just write that novel by myself.

Like actually, there was somebody who made it possible for me to do that. I didn't just make all that money by my own. You know, I mean, partly by my own skill, but I didn't do that on my own. Like I was part of like an economic unit that includes the person who was doing my laundry, the person who was keeping my house safe and hygienic, like, you know, so I think that like, it starts with recognizing that women do most of that work and that is, you know, an incredible injustice.

Um, but you know, I could imagine a future where uplifting that work becomes an issue for all of us, because it's no longer considered just women's work. Yeah. So it was funny. My brain was going to this, like if we want it to be valued and compensated at a higher level,

then we need to get men to start doing it. And it sounded sort of flippant in my brain, but I didn't mean it that way. I think when other people who haven't historically been doing this work do the work, their respect for it goes up quite a deal. Because I work outside of the home, and I can tell you that the work that I do outside the home,

I'm an entrepreneur, which is incredibly hard. I've written a book incredibly hard. Like, there are so many things that I've done that are incredibly hard, and I will tell you that none of it is as hard as the work that I do inside the home. And yes, it's rewarding. And yes, I love my tiny human,

and I can't even imagine having four or five. You know, like, and I think it is more valued inside my own household because my husband does a lot of that work himself. And so it speaks to what I think you just were saying, which is the element of recognition and experience of, in this case, men, because they haven't been the ones that have been historically doing this work,

I think is really, really important for it to increase in value. Not because men should be the ones assigning value, but just because we understand and value things more when we experience them. I think I might flip that a little bit in that, like I agree with you on everything you're saying, but it seems to me like the valuing it should come first

and then maybe men would wanna do it more rather than because men are doing it, you know, it's more valuable. But I'm sure we've all experienced this thing, right? Where we are like, you know, taking our kids to the playground and like nobody says anything and then like a man shows up with their kids

and everyone's like, what an amazing father spending time with their actual children, you know? So like, I think we all see how that actually works, you know? Yeah, I talk about that all the time. Jay always gets complimented on how engaged of a father he is. I've never once gotten the compliment

of what an engaged mother I am. And we both work full-time, we both do really well for ourselves. It's this sort of, if anything, I'm sure that there are people who are not to my face because they wouldn't do it, but behind the scenes feeling really sorry for my kid because I'm not engaged enough as a mom, right?

Like there's that double standard. Emily, I could talk to you about this all day long, and I know it is complex and there aren't any simple solutions, and I'm so grateful for you to be doing this work, bringing it to the forefront and sort of continuing this movement for this wages for housework, care, income. For our listener, Emily is not on social media, which you know I love and respect. So the best way to find and support her and her work is to go get the book.

Wages for Housework. Go to bookshop.org or go to your local bookstore. Let's keep them in business. Emily, thank you so much for the conversation and for being our guest. Thank you so much, Nicole. Thank you for your amazing, thoughtful questions. This is really a lot of fun. It's nice to get feisty with someone. So, all right, friend, here's the deal.

It's time we all stop pretending that the work inside the home is anything less than real, valuable, essential labor. Because here's the truth. If the unpaid, often invisible labor of caregiving, parenting, and homemaking suddenly disappeared tomorrow, the whole fucking system would collapse. The achievers, the grit and grinders,

the alphas, and the money makers would all come to a screeching halt. And then they'd know. Our caregivers are allowed to take up space. They should spend the money they've earned. They deserve to name the value of the work that they do and we damn well should too. Because knowing that none of this works without them,

that is woman's work.